


clamorous and quiet (I am the only one here)

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [202]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Amras' saint name is Gabriel, Angst, First Meetings, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Mithrim, Twins, Uneasy Allies, title from the poem 'Angel' by Angela Jackson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:15:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23254549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: “They are my kin.” Family is too close a word. “They won’t hurt me.”But he doesn’t know that.
Relationships: Amras & Amrod (Tolkien), Amras & Argon | Arakáno, Amras & Celegorm | Turcafinwë, Amras & Original Character(s), Amras & Sons of Fëanor
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [202]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	clamorous and quiet (I am the only one here)

Amras has not told Mollie much about his family, because it was impossible to do so without brushing up against the ice-sharp hurt he wouldn’t speak aloud. He told her of other things, in the stables, when _she_ was still a creature of uncertain future.

That all changed in a matter of hours. The world changed, as it had in the last few years of Amras’ life: violently. Violence could be as little, or as much, as the look on someone’s face.

Nearly the moment their cousins arrived—their cousins and Uncle Fingolfin, with half an army besides—Mollie’s status as a possible spy, or as a troublesome whore, faded into the periphery.

Amras was grateful for that. He had trusted her for a long while, of course. He had defended her and ensured that she was permitted to stay. He had sought comfort from her when he had no one else to turn to.

Now, he asks her to stand guard.

Curufin, not Celegorm, is the one who warns against comings and goings. In the tangled yarn of recent discoveries, Mithrim’s people have drawn more tightly together, yet without purpose or rest.

Celegorm is mulish and quiet and will not say what he learned from Aredhel, though they have all gathered that he _spoke_ to Aredhel. What they learned from Uncle Fingolfin—which Amras, of course, heard secondhand—was enough.

Maitimo was living. Was, and then was not.

Another ice-sharp hurt, the kind that numbs tender flesh before slashing it open. It is the warmth of blood that brings you back.

_You._

_Not now,_ Amras pleads. In flame-red memory, he can only see them. Both of them. Gone.

“I do not know—” Mollie says, and he stamps his foot impatiently.

“They are my _kin_.” Family is too close a word. “They won’t hurt me.”

But he doesn’t know that.

(The boy in the water is not the same as violence. Not anymore.)

(The brother who was living, three days past, is still a warm body.)

Amras tells Mollie to call like a scrub jay if she sees anyone but Celegorm.

“If you see Celegorm,” he admits, “The jig is up. Just stay low and I’ll try to be careful on my way back.”

(This is the sort of plot he used to hatch with—)

Mithrim is not wholly surrounded by water, and since Amras has no desire to swim across the broad inlet that runs beneath the bridge, he seeks another way out. This other way is still a treacherous one: he creeps around the far edge of the lake, low along the field, avoiding the mines his father planted.

He could die, like this.

(He hoped that the coming of his kin meant death, before he knew who they were. And even after.)

It is easier than it should be, to reach the other side. Easier than Celegorm would like it to be, or Curufin. Amras feels his heart beating high and fast in his chest, and reminds himself that he hates the brothers he has left. They don’t understand anything.

For his part, he isn’t thinking about anything, until he casts a glance back over his shoulder and sees Caranthir’s dark head like a spot of ink under the sunshine.

 _Caw, caw_ , calls Mollie.

Amras drops low and holds still. Playing dead.

(It is very hard to believe…

 _Hush now_ , says the water-boy, and Amras breathes.)

  
Caranthir is not Celegorm, and he makes a poor showing of his investigation. He bobs and weaves and does not know what to do with his limbs. Amras watches him in disgust for a while, through the weeds, and then slips along on his belly, over the muddy, marshy ground.

He is drenched and covered in filth. Perhaps swimming would have been better. He can never undo such mistakes, however.

Amras does his best to wash his hands when he is crouched on the opposite shore. He makes a poor showing.

He has two scares: one outside the camp, one inside. When he is trying to find his way out of the cattail rushes that grow along the water, much as they did at Formenos, he sees a tall native woman—very tall, for a woman—talking with a man who is shorter than she is. The man reminds Amras of Fingon.

Amras feels very queer inside, about Fingon.

It was Fingon who learned the truth about Maedhros, and though Amras has known Fingon mostly from afar (but fondly, always fondly), he is not surprised that it was Fingon who dug up such news.

 _Maitimo Maitimo Maitimo_ , he repeats inwardly, staying as still as a mouse until there is a chance to slip up over the bank and into the trees that skirt the makeshift tents.

They are not like mice, those tents. They are great billowing cats, and yet he wants very badly to make something safe of them.

Amras doesn’t remember many details in Uncle Fingolfin’s house. The family’s one visit there ended with Athair holding a pistol to Uncle Fingolfin’s chest. That is what he recalls best. As much as _Mamaí_ tried to hold him— _them_ —close to her, he peeped through her hands and saw.

Amras is ever doomed to see what is terribly present, and what should be lost and gone away.

It is not a place, then, that he expects to find, outside of Mithrim. There will be no papered walls or heavy walnut furniture preserved amid the wilderness.

He expects—

The uneasy, warlike bustle of Grandfather Finwe’s dining room, tempered by Grandfather Finwe’s booming laughter? The seashore, chattering with cousins, dangerous if one drew near Celegorm or Aredhel or Curufin, safe if one was within the reach of Maitimo’s strong arms?

Amras expects, maybe, a shift in his pulse; a sensation in his chest.

He finds neither. He finds nothing that he recognizes.

Ragged men and women, scrawny as branches, are huddled together around cookfires that spew ribbons of smoke along the invisible lines of the breeze. Amras brought a hat with him—it is now muddy, also—and has pulled it over his bright hair.

Anyone who knows him, here, would know him by his hair.

It is strange to look upon these nameless people and wonder which of them knew Maitimo. Were they his friends? Did they hurt him? Amras knows that his brother is dead, but he does not like to think of him _hurt_.

There is a flash of gold, between the dingy canvas and the rising smoke. Amras drops down, mouth opening and closing like a fish, while Artanis passes by. The frown on her face is thunderous, and the same as always, but there has never been anything strictly _familiar_ about his cousin.

That is the scare. The sight of her, fierce and purposeful. Older than she should be. He has not seen her, until now. Only Aredhel came to the meeting in the fort.

Then he hears voices.

“Has Haleth given you no word?”

“None yet. She needs time to think. Not about Fingon—” and there, even if the voice was not an achingly near relation to Athair’s, the way it shapes _that_ name would give it away—

Uncle Fingolfin finishes: “She has her own people and her own concerns to attend to. Thingol, I understand, is not a patient man.”

Uncle Fingolfin and Finrod are holding council a little ways off. Closer than Artanis was. Amras clasps his muddy knees in his hands, sheltering in the shadow of a tree trunk rather than a mother or a twin. He tries to beat back the tears that swim in his eyes.

If they find him, he does not know what will happen to him. No matter what Athair did (no matter what Maitimo is not _here_ to do), he does not, in fact, think that they will kill him. He is only…he is not yet full a man. That matters, to people with codes.

Uncle Fingolfin has—or had—a code.

Still, he may be held hostage, by this family that is not his family. If given the chance, they could use him to weaken Maglor, who is already weak. Or perhaps their target would be Celegorm, who looks wounded not when he walks, but when he is standing still.

This is a sobering prospect. He must be careful, on the uncertain border of wood and clearing, lake and land.

Amras turns his head, away from the council, searching. He does not see Argon anywhere.

He only knows _now_ , in this searching moment, that it was Argon he came to find. A friend, in all this wasteland.

Maybe Argon is dead. It has grown more difficult, after several violent turns of time, to know if _out of sight_ means _out of life._

The voices are coming closer, and Amras’ body moves before his mind can. He creeps quietly, because fear is stronger than courage or kinship—or else, it has become so.

Amras makes for one of the hulking swells of canvas. His uncle and his fair-haired cousin are walking together, conversing in the sort of low and serious voices that Athair and Maitimo used to exchange, all the way west. _Alike, and yet unlike._

They have crossed his previous hiding place. Ahead is a risky and visible path; beside him is another choice. The canvas flap hangs inviting, still. There seems to be no movement in this tent.

Amras lifts the flap and slips inside. 

The hobgoblin catches him round the middle, and sends him flying back with a humiliating thump. He just missed a tent-pole; he should be grateful for that.

“Suffering Christ!” Amras shouts. It’s something Celegorm used to say.

“Sticks!” commands a voice—a twisted, low-pitched voice. “Let him be.”

“He’s a spy!” shrills the hobgoblin, but it climbs off him and stands back, legs apart, arms akimbo, surveying him with frosty blue eyes.

It takes Amras a long moment to realize that there are three people in the tent, and that (the hobgoblin aside) they do not mean him harm. There is a woman seated among sacks and horse blankets, with another blanket over her knees, and there is a small, dark-haired boy in a shirt cut much too large for him.

The woman has only one eye, and her mouth is all wrong.

The Amras of a year ago would feel terror clawing at his throat. Would hear one of Curufin’s horrible banshee tales ringing in his ears and allow it to fill him with fear of the warped woman, not of whomever made her like that.

She is sitting, quite peaceably at the moment. Two whole hands are folded in her lap. Whoever hurt her is not _here_.

Amras sits up, dazed, and watches as the woman’s face changes. It is of greater importance, somehow, than the hobgoblin. That _look_. Recognition, in that look.

The hobgoblin doesn’t like losing his attention. “Git on, you!” it cries. “Git on and leave us!”

“I’m not—I’m not here to speak to _you_ ,” Amras says, stuttering a little. His hat slips off his head.

The woman opens her mouth, and it is an almost ordinary mouth, like that. The scars go up her cheeks, that’s all.

“Who—Sticks,” she says, more sharply. “Sticks, _wait_.”

“Red,” says the boy with the dark hair and dark eyes, hopping up from beside the woman. “Red.”

They are all shiny-eyed some count of moments later. Sticks, the hobgoblin, is a girl. And even though she is a girl, she doesn’t want to be seen crying, so she rubs her scrawny paws against her eyes and scowls. The boy is so young that Amras breathes uneasily, trying to remember what he _should_ know, about how soon and how well children talk and think of things.

He can’t remember a time that he wasn’t thinking.

But the boy blinks his liquid dark eyes and says nothing, not after he first said _Red_.

Estrela is the name of the woman with one eye, and she is the one who talks about Maitimo. That is the cause of all their crying. Amras came here for nothing, though he set Mollie to guard—and then he thought he was here for Argon, but he did not find Argon, after all.

The day isn’t warm, but the air has dried up in the afternoon. There is no more fog. Through a hole at the corner of the tent, Amras can see a handkerchief patch of blue sky. He squints at it.

“So, you are the youngest?” Estrela is asking. She talks in a labored way, because of her scars, and Amras tries to listen carefully without looking like it’s a trouble to understand.

It’s dreadful to think of his own mother made _like_ _that_ , but if Estrela is Sticks’ mother, or Frog’s (the boy’s name is Frog), perhaps they have grown used to it. They don’t seem to fear her.

Her skin is closer to the color of Frog’s, and her hair is dark.

“I’m young,” he says stupidly. It is all he can say. He sits cross-legged, with his hands ground into the earth beneath him.

“Russandol would be ten o’you,” Sticks says critically, looking at him with a sour expression. “And he ain’t never spoken of _brothers_.”

“He couldn’t have, there,” Estrela says carefully, before Amras can snap something inside of him, shouting at Sticks. “It wasn’t safe, where we were. But you can see, can’t you, Sticks? How much they are alike.”

There is a little portion of Amras’ heart that puffs up with pride, at that. The rest is grey and cold. “Why do you call him Russandol? Didn’t he tell you his name?”

Estrela shakes her head. She is thin, and her ragged clothes sag over her bones. Her hair is cut raggedly to her ears. But he knew at once that she was a woman. He imagines that Maitimo wouldn’t have looked askance at her. He would have been solemn and polite first, and then he would have been gay and cheerful, if it—if it was safe.

Only then.

“You’ve seen all my cousins,” Amras says thickly. “Do you know their names?”

It seems right to ask after Argon again.

And that is how he learns where Fingon has gone.

He doesn’t swim or crawl back. He sneaks out of the camp and then runs for the bridge. He is angry in that brittle way that belonged to Athair, but which he won’t believe makes him _like_ Athair.

They didn’t talk much, about the bad things, but Estrela knew no Argon. No Anaire. Silence like that means death.

For this reason, though river mud is on him, he doesn’t enter the water. To sink beneath the surface, to open his eyes to the murky, frigid depths, to see himself look back at himself—

He cannot bear it.

Still, he has taken a risk, and will pay for it.

Celegorm is waiting at the foot of Mithrim hill.

_There are stables here_ , Amras said, when he had learned a little of the place where they had lived, Sticks and Frog and Estrela. Sticks spoke almost volubly of stables, houses, shanties. But once these locations were exhausted, she wouldn’t say anymore. Amras felt the silliness of his own situation, a visitor and a spy who didn’t want to be either, exactly, and had tried to make up for it by saying,

_There’s a cat in our stable. If you like cats._

A truce hung in the air. Sticks considered. She made the same face the men and women of Mithrim did when they were considering a bet at the card table. Then:

_I like cats._

_Amras, will you be missed?_ Estrela asked gently. He’d grown to like the sound of her voice, and he was too tired, deep inside, to care at all about whether he should.

But as for her question—

He knew he _would_ be missed. Not in the old way, where someone warm and beloved stood ringing the dinner-bell at a red-painted kitchen door, not in the old way of running over the lush May grass to answer the call of hooves. But there were eyes in Mithrim watching for any sign of broken trust.

He would be missed, in the way he too had thought (long ago, now) that Uncle Fingolfin might hold him for ransom.

“Where the hell have you been?”

He isn’t sorry it’s Celegorm. Celegorm carries too much anger, in him, to make space for grief these days. Amras cannot look at Maglor, or the brightness of Curufin, who is not so sly as he thinks he is. Curufin never left Athair’s bedside, and Amras can’t leave Amrod-in-the-water, and the mirror of that is sharp-edged and cruel.

Caranthir is too much, too blunt, but Celegorm—

“I came back,” Amras says. _And I will go back to them, to Estrela and Sticks and Frog_ , he thinks, but does not say. He squares his shoulders, and stares Celegorm in his burning eyes. Celegorm’s eyes have more green in them than anyone else’s.

Maitimo used to call him _seamróg_ , young clover, in his sweet-laughing voice, and Celegorm pretended to mind it, but he didn’t.

Celegorm is half love and half rage. The first is dead, but Amras will take the second.

He has to, these days. Half is all he ever is.

Celegorm snarls, “I see that, you little bastard.”

Huan whines beside him.

“Quiet, Huan,” Celegorm says, and then, “They could have killed you.”

“Oh, horse-shit,” Amras snaps. “They wouldn’t.”

Silence. Celegorm’s mouth is a tight line, and he says,

“Your girl told me where you’d gone.”

“Mollie? Did you hurt her?”

“ _Suffering_ —I didn’t.”

Amras feels small beside him. Beside his ever-broadening shoulders and his high hat. He wishes that he didn’t have to hurt Celegorm, but he does.

“I went to find Argon.”

Celegorm twitches a little. And it’s then that Amras knows:

Argon is dead.

Silence—means—

“Fingon went after Maitimo,” Amras says, all in a great rush, before the pity he shouldn’t have forestalls him. “He left in the night. Fingon—he thinks he’s still alive.”

It cannot be a gift, but it is not meant to be a curse.

Amras is only ever the bearer of news.


End file.
